‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing’ (or words to that effect)

A study of a Web quotation

Martin Porter

January 2002

(The various URLs provided below won’t all work by the time you read this
document, but a lot of them should. They were all last visited in early
January, 2002.)

The Henrik Hudson School District Library Media Centre provides a model
essay for students which ends with the words,

Perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, victims: we can be clear
about three of these categories. The bystander, however, is the
fulcrum. If there are enough notable exceptions, then protest reaches
a critical mass. We don’t usually think of history as being shaped by
silence, but, as English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only
thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do
nothing.’(this is a commonly known quote and does not need to be
cited)

It is interesting that the words ‘of evil’ were inadvertently omitted. I
have filled them in in square brackets. The wording in bold italics is of
course not part of the essay, but a directive to the students to avoid
being unnecessarily pedantic: a quote this common does not need a
citation, just as you don’t give a citation for Marx’s ‘workers of the
world unite’, or Jesus’s ‘give us this day our daily bread’. It is
sufficient to remind the reader that they issued from the pen, or the
mouth, of Edmund Burke, who, whether we call him an English philosopher or
an Irish politician, requires nothing more in the way of
introduction.

And certainly it is a common quote. In fact it is possibly the commonest
political quote you will find anywhere on the World Wide Web. It is
used to warn of the encroachments of government, and to warn that
governments do not do enough. It appeals to both left and right alike, and
is equally useful in either camp. If you type the basic words of the quote
into any of the leading search engines, you will find thousands upon
thousands of web pages that contain Burke’s warning, either
making some sort of statement
(usually political), or as a quotable quote ready and waiting to
be cut and pasted to help form yet another web page.

It is in fact one of the classic quotes. It would not be too great an
exaggeration to say that for the Web community that have made use of it, it
is the quote that keeps the memory of Burke alive, rather than Burke’s
position as a writer that has led to him being quoted. It is always quoted
with considerable reverence, and is made to stand as one of the
unassailable truths about the need for freedom of action in democratic
societies, a truth which crosses party divides and national loyalties.

Unfortunately, however, everybody quotes it slightly differently.

So in addition to,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

Sometimes a comma is placed before the ‘is’, but we won’t worry about that.
These variants are, I suppose, fairly harmless, in that they do not change
the meaning, but many forms of the sentence contain before ‘good men’ a
further qualifier to indicate an amount:

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a few good men to do nothing

Now here of course we have a problem. Presumably our population of men
contains good men, bad men, and in-between men, the bad men being the ones
who work for the triumph of evil. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that
the good men amount to 10% of the population. Now if a few good men,
say 2% of the population, do nothing, you still have 8% of the population
made up of good men who are doing something. Will the efforts of the 8%
fail because of the inertia of the 2%? If so, Burke’s sentence seems to be
saying that all good men must be active in resisting a particular evil, and
this, unless the activity were seen as a definition of goodness, is so
unlikely to take place that one would expect the triumph of the evil to be
guaranteed. After all, some of the good men may be ill in bed. Or it may
mean that certain well-placed good men do nothing. But that would be a mere
tautology, another way of saying that the evil will succeed unless certain
good men in a position to prevent it from succeeding act to prevent it. All
this of course presupposes that the sentence makes good sense without the
additional ‘a few’, about which more below.
Similar remarks apply to ‘some’ for ‘few’,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for some good men to do nothing

- although this makes the sentence tautological again, since ‘enough’
must mean ‘enough for evil to triumph’. Despite the weakness of the sentence in
this form, the presence of ‘enough’ is very common. Look out for more
examples below.

The word ‘necessary’ is frequently replaced by something else. ‘essential’ is
very popular,

All that is essential for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

- for whoever wrote that, it cannot be Burke. A colloquial idiom of the 20th
century, completely alien to the prose style of the 18th century in
general and Burke’s style in particular, has been grafted onto the front
of the sentence. Similar objections can be raised to the contraction of
‘that is’,

All that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing

Nor can we always expect to find ‘good men’. In the 18th century, ‘good
men’ would have been in accord with the reality of the division of
political power between the sexes, and quite stylistically acceptable to
Burke’s (predominantly male) reading audience. Today it cries out for
modification, or comment, as happens cheekily here,

So far we have tried to be systematic in presenting the Protean forms of Burke’s
famous quotation. But henceforth system may be abandoned. Suffice it to say
that endless variants exist, and it would require the patience and skill of
an expert palaeontologist to classify them all. Let us instead pick out a
few gems:

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing

‘doing nothing’ is something which is done. Burke had the reputation
among the Victorians of being one of the very greatest prose stylists
in English Literature. One cannot think much of their judgement if this
is his authentic voice.

The only thing that has to happen in this world for evil to triumph is for good men to do
nothing

The original context shows that this modification was not intended as a joke:

British statesman Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the
triumph of evil in America is for good men to do nothing." America is one
of the last strongholds of freedom on earth - and citizens who are
dedicated to God are the only resources for the preservation of our
freedoms, including our freedom to serve Him.

This pair need a little more comment because we come back to meaning
again. They are converses of each other. The first means that if
evil triumphs, good men will have done nothing, and the second that if
good men do nothing, evil triumphs. But in the second it is possible for
good men to do something while evil still triumphs, and in the first it
is possible for good men to do nothing and for evil still to fail to triumph.

If you neglected your math and logic while at school and find this a bit
confusing, the following may help,

Assuming you have a full range of kitchen implements,
and are inspecting your limited larder, the following
two statements are true:

To make pancake batter it is necessary to have flour.

To make pancake batter it is sufficient to have eggs, milk,
flour, and sardines.

and the following two statements are false:

To make pancake batter it is sufficient to have flour.

To make pancake batter it is necessary to have eggs, milk,
flour, and sardines.

And a few of the rest (for all cannot be presented here), which may be shown
without comment,

All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing

This survey is based on different forms of Burke’s quote found at over
1,000 different Web pages, which are a sample taken from the tens of thousands
of pages on which, in my estimate, the sentence, in one of its many forms,
can be found. The pages of the sample do have one thing in common,
however. They all contain the name ‘Burke’. No matter how much the quote
varies, it is always attributed to the self-same Edmund Burke, who was
born in Dublin in 1728, and died at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire on 8th
July 1797.

Inevitably, if you have bothered to read this far, you must be wondering
what the correct form of the quote is. And certainly it is a matter of
some importance, because there is so much variation in the wording between
the examples, as to throw the true meaning into considerable doubt. Quotes
out of context are very easy to misunderstand even when the wording is
precisely known. If we do not know the wording or the context we have no
chance of being certain about the true meaning of a quoted phrase.

Here, however, there is a problem. Not one of the web pages
I have looked at, despite the most diligent searching,
give a reference that would enable you to trace it back to its
source, and so discover its exact form. One page I found does include it
as part of a longer quotation like this,

‘The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and
by parts ... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good
men to do nothing.’

The quote was in precisely this form, with two sentences separated with
three dots. Perhaps whoever wrote the page had seen the quotation in
context, and trimmed it down to this shape.
But when contacted, the author of the page said, ‘I’m sorry, but I no
longer remember where on the Internet I found the source for that quote.’

As it happens, I have found about twenty other pages on the Web where the
quote is given in this mysterious form. No doubt the authors of those pages
would not be able to remember where they got it from either. Here are some
of them,

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and
by parts ... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good
men to do nothing.

How strange, to make a quotation that includes a mark of omission! Did not one
of these quoters wonder what had been omitted? Or how much had been
omitted? A few words? A few sentences? Paragraphs? Volumes?

But a clue is at hand at one more page, a French page, offering familiar
quotations in English. It includes,

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and
by parts.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing.
Edmund Burke

Here they are given as quite separate quotes. From this page, or one
similar to it, they have become joined by copying and pasting followed
by a bit of editing. In this way the quote works its way around the
Web, for ever being slightly mis-remembered, or slightly altered for
reasons of personal prejudice, until it is changed almost out of
recognition by a process of Chinese whispers. So what is the one true
original of all the variants?

Perhaps by now you can guess the answer I am going to give.

There is no original. The quote is bogus, and Burke never said it. It
is a pseudo-quote, and corresponds to real quotes in the same way that
urban legends about the ghost hitch-hiker vanishing in the back of the
car and alligators in the sewers correspond to true news stories.

This at least is my assertion, and I base it upon the following,

1) I cannot find
a reference for the quote
in my own Dictionary of Quotations,
or in any of those consulted in my local city library,
or at
http://www.bartleby.com/100/,
or in any other online Dictionary of Quotations I have
consulted.

2) If it were genuine, it would have one, or possibly two,
noteworthy variants at most. For example, Milton’s line,

Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new

is frequently misquoted as

Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new

But the line does not, could not, exist in hundreds of different forms.
Furthermore, after a little thought, you can usually see a
plausible reason for a misquotation. In Milton’s line he was echoing older
poets where woods were a part of pastoral life, but they are rare enough
now for ‘fields and pastures’ to seem like a more natural description of
the English countryside. There is nothing in the pseudo-Burke quote that
can explain the endless variation of forms.

3) If it were genuine, it would be easily traceable. For any quote this
common, reference to an encyclopaedia, dictionary of quotations, or the
internet will usually reveal the source quickly. Furthermore great quotes
(and this is supposed to be one), come usually from great works, which are
again readily accessible, and are often on the internet in machine
readable form as E-texts.
The few Burke E-texts I have downloaded do not contain the quote.
Even if this quote were from a minor work (the corner of
one of Burke’s laundry lists for example), its fame would
make the containing work famous and we would be able to find it. The fact
that none of the thousands of web pages that give the quote cite a source
is, for me, conclusive evidence that it is an invention.

But if anyone can trace this quote back to the authentic writings of
Edmund Burke, email your findings to
martin@tartarus.org,
and I will remove this web page forthwith.

The only question left to answer is where it actually came from. The title
at the top of this web page is the form which, to me, sounds most like Burke,

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing’

It has about it the eighteenth century sound, it mentions ‘good’ and
‘evil’, which are certainly part of Burke’s political vocabulary, and
it is a generalisation, like most of the other quotes by Burke that you
see. The one thing you can say about the pseudo-quote is that it does
remind you a bit of a real Burke quote, and that, I think, is the clue to
where it comes from. Someone has read through a list of them and composed
another one in a similar style. But although it is not unlike Burke, it
does not feel quite genuine. Burke will use the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’,
but he never reduces politics to the primitive level of describing his
side as the good people and his opponents as the forces of evil they have
to combat. In the pseudo-quote you do get the feeling of
Buzz Lightyear, and the other good men of Star
Command, fighting the evil Emperor Zurg, sworn enemy of the Galactic
Alliance. And despite appearing to be precise, the exact meaning is not
altogether clear. Are the men good in an absolute sense, or are they being
described as good because they see the evil? Can they be described as good
if they do nothing? Are not other things necessary for evil to triumph?
Some degree of public enthusiasm for the evil, for example?

Triumphant evil has often been cast down by plain in-between men, and
indeed by bad men. The human sacrifice practised among the Incas we may
regard as evil, but the Conquistadors who brought it to an end we may
equally regard as having been bad men. An attempt by a small and evil
group to revive human sacrifice in modern society would fail, not through
resistance by good men, but by a complete lack of support for such a crazy
idea. But once you qualify the pseudo-quote to except these cases, its
meaning is reduced to a mere truism, that if bad things are happening, we
must do something about it.

The pseudo-quote is therefore without authenticity or meaning, and is
just another of those political slogans which are used not as an
assistance to, but as a substitute for real thought.
It is not a deep truth, although it is constantly treated as one.
Burke incidentally
hated such things. He thought that cheap political slogans, or
‘maxims’ as he called them, enabled politicians to invoke principles
of expediency, so they could pursue their own selfish interests instead
of fulfilling their obligations to country, party and people.
To him they were quite distinct from the deeps truths, or as he calls
them here, ‘first principles’,

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their
maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to
first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as
copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first
capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the
worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but
measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every
honourable engagement.
Edmund Burke

And to this quote we can give a proper attribution,

Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the cause of the present discontents, 1770. In
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, edited by Henry Froude,
Oxford University Press, 1909, Volume 2, page 83, lines 7 to 16.